Children's Books: ‘When I Became Your Daddy'

Wall Street Journal

17-06-2025

A baby sea otter frisks with his father through Britta Teckentrup's pastel illustrations in 'When I Became Your Daddy,' a rhyming picture book by Susannah Shane. Designed to be read aloud by a father—ideally at bedtime, perhaps on Father's Day—the text consists of mild, amiable words of support on the theme of paternal steadfastness. 'If you ever lose your way and everything feels wrong,' the listening child will hear, 'remember that I'm here for you—to help guide you along.' Ms. Teckentrup's stylized pictures give buoyancy to this gentle and sedate exercise for children ages 2-7.
The writer Fran Nuño evokes more sophisticated ideas in 'The Vase With the Golden Cracks,' a picture book about a Japanese father who passes down to his son a love of Japan's language and culture. Zuzanna Celej's pale watercolor-and-collage illustrations bring a sense of hushed elegance to the son's narrative. We learn that the father keeps a vase full of snippets of paper with Japanese words that lack simple corollaries in English (or in Spanish, from which Jon Brokenbrow translated the original text). Through the fictional father, children ages 5-10 will learn words and concepts including ikigai, which means 'our mission in life, the one that makes us wake up every day full of joy.' An afterword contains other charming, untranslatable examples such as zanka, 'the flowers that still stay upright in a flower arrangement when all the others have gone floppy,' and amaoto, 'the sound of rain falling.' There is a minor error in the first sentence—a superfluous 'that'—but such a solecism is easily forgiven in a book as unusual as this one.
The writer David Elliott and the illustrator Eugene Yelchin pair their talents to droll and beguiling effect in 'Boar and Hedgehog,' a picture book for children ages 4-9 about a prickly friendship. Boar is a sour, solitary fellow who, in Mr. Yelchin's illustrations, glowers out at the world from hostile and heavy-lidded eyes. Hedgehog is a perky little character who cannot keep from meddling in the boar's affairs. Hedgehog suggests that Boar make his den in a sunnier spot, for example, and that he avoid living too close to a rising river. When Boar gets a stomachache, having 'overdone it in the strawberry patch,' it is Hedgehog who trots along with the makings of herbal tea. Boar takes the remedy and, we read, 'sooner than you could say dyspepsia, he was feeling right as rain.' The hedgehog's acts of kindness add up until even the supremely antisocial boar can no longer ignore them, giving rise to a spirit of real (if grudging) amity.